His bosses were tyrannical, but Keyes stuck with the job, and ended with enough money to cover his first year of tuition. To pay his way through college, Keyes waited tables at a restaurant called Meyer’s Goody Shoppe. Other events from Keyes’ life, like the jobs he did growing up, would also influence the novel. It might have seemed trivial during the time, but both experiences would help him write Flowers for Algernon years later. In April 1945, near the end of his first year at NYU, Keyes asked himself during a train ride, “What would happen if it were possible to increase a person’s intelligence?” As he puzzled over the question that day, Keyes went to biology class and dissected a mouse for a lab assignment. Although he dreamed of being a writer, Keyes’ parents wanted him to be a doctor. The scholarships, which were awarded for the first time this year, include The Daniel Keyes Family Endowed Scholarship, and the Daniel Keyes Family Graduate Scholarships in Creative Writing.įlowers for Algernon has a long history, stretching back to Keyes’ days as a premed major at New York University. In honor of that important time, Daniel Keyes spent here, his daughters Hillary and Leslie Keyes have generously set up several scholarships for Wayne State English students. Keyes’ beloved novel has been translated into 27 different languages, taught to a countless number of students in English classes, and was actually written during Keyes’ time at our very own Wayne State. The novel, originally a novella, is the tragic tale of a science experiment that turns a mentally challenged man named Charlie Gordon into a genius. In this full-bodied, richly populated novel, its appeal is stronger than ever.Daniel Keyes was an American writer and professor best-known for Flowers for Algernon, a science fiction novel that’s sold more than five million copies since its publication in 1966. In other versions, as a widely anthologized story and as a noteworthy television drama, Flowers for Algernon has fascinated millions. Unpredictable dangers may lie ahead for Charlie and for Algernon. And yet, beneath the surface, there is dread. Won by Charlie from the start, the reader follows his great adventure with rapt attention, high hope, a mounting sense of triumph. So begins Daniel Keyes's strikingly original first novel. Suppose Charlie underwent a similar operation. Algernon was now a very special mouse, a downright genius among mice. There was even a white mouse named Algernon who in some ways was brighter than Charlie.īut an extraordinary operation had been performed upon Algernon. He knew that knowledge itself was important, and he had learned to read and write after a fashion but he also knew that he wasn't nearly so bright as all the people around him.
Until he was thirty-two, Brooklyn-born Charlie Gordon - gentle, amiable, oddly engaging - had lived in a kind of mental twilight.
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